


Notre Dame

by CanterburyTales



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Gratuitous Philosophy, Interrogation, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, Paris (City)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 09:17:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1184510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CanterburyTales/pseuds/CanterburyTales
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Love is for children. I owe him a debt." </p><p>Once upon a time, an archer met a widow in Paris. He rescued her, and some years later she rescued him back. </p><p>That is the edited version, because that is what stories are.</p><p>Inspired by Natasha talking philosophy in <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/972937">1796 Broadway</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notre Dame

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [1796 Broadway](https://archiveofourown.org/works/972937) by [rainproof](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainproof/pseuds/rainproof), [teaberryblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/teaberryblue/pseuds/teaberryblue). 



> In case it isn't clear, bolded quoted text is what we see when Natasha talks to Loki in the holding cell. The rest is inside Natasha's head. 
> 
> The Boris Grushenko quote is via this [APS article: "‘To suffer is to suffer’: Analyzing the Russian national character"](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/were-only-human/to-suffer-is-to-suffer-analyzing-the-russian-national-character.html). 
> 
> The quote "It is not the sleep of reason that produces monsters..." is from _Anti-Oedipus_ by Deleuze and Guattari. 
> 
> The cover art shows the front facade of Notre Dame, not the side, because art and because wikicommons.

The alien stood in the cage, the glass shielding without concealing. She stood before him alone, as solitary as the statue of Eve that looks down on the center of Paris, forever apart from Adam. Loki and Natasha Romanov spoke together but it was no conversation. It was a battle to the death.

 

> **“Is this love, Agent Romanov?” His voice was beautiful, with a hint of amused surprise.**

Sanskrit had ninety-six words for love, Greek three, Russian and English only one. But the number of words wasn’t the problem.

She could imagine Loki probing Clint like a broken tooth. She could almost hear Clint speak. “Yeah, I love her.” She knew as well as she knew herself what Clint would have said. Did Loki know he was changing Clint’s words from a verb to a noun, from actions to a Platonic Form?

The writers of English had attempted precision: _affection_ , _lust_ , _romance_ , _fondness,_ _admiration, companionship, adoration_ but the urge to reify beat them all, smeared the words together like newspaper print in the rain. “True love conquers all.” “All you need is love.” All the types of love mingled in one impossible dream which would give you everything, that would save you.

The Russians were luckier. They had Grushenko. “To love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer.” The Russians might make Love a thing but it was not an escape. There was no happy ever after. There was no eternal bliss.

There was nothing. Everyone was a machine. They had told her in the Red Room that history was destiny, everything propelling mankind to an evitable end. She did not think that now. It was all chance, happenstance. There was no I, there was nothing but brain processes, controlling, estimating, reacting, editing.

Such processes ran now, moulded in her by her training. “Do not lie unless you must,” they had told her. “A truth is more difficult to detect. But also know there are many truths.”

A truth was moulded for Loki’s ears. Her voice was dismissive, level as before.

 

> **“Love is for children. I owe him a debt.”**
> 
> **Loki moved backwards a step, half nodded, smiled. He moved back towards the bench in the cage, held out both hands as if offering her a gift. “Tell me.”**

So, the alien wanted a story. The cool processes gathered what Loki must know and believe, and like Scheherazade wove a tale for the prince who wanted to kill her.

 

> **“Before I worked for SHIELD, I uh…well, I made a name for myself.” She moved to a seat as she spoke, and sat down. “I have a very specific skillset. I didn’t care who I used for, or on. I got on SHIELD’s radar in a bad way.“ Loki sat and listened, face still and expressionless. There was something of the snake in the motionlessness of his body, the angle of his head.**

That name was the Black Widow, silent and deadly. Clint Barton did not know her then, except as an adversary. She knew now that that he had admired her excellence then, the fineness of her kills, the elegance of her movements and the precision of her work. There is beauty in killing as in everything else, and she found it in him too, in his perfect stillness, in the sudden bolt like lightning from heaven.

Perhaps that was love, of a kind. Plato would have said so. The Athenian set the love of beauty in the abstract over the love of beauty in a person. What Clint and she had felt towards each other was certainly abstract, in the years before they touched hands, a cool appreciation of each other in the struggle to stay alive. It was truly, if perversely, Platonic.

She was a beautiful machine. A tool like a fine sword, wielded by others, and as undiscriminating. She was too fine, too excellent and so Barton had been sent to destroy the thing which had shed so much blood. But that was not what he did.

 

> **“Agent Barton was sent to kill me, he made a different call.”**

Inside Notre-Dame de Paris, in a chapel on the south side of the nave with faux medieval patterns on the walls, an eighteenth century marble monument stands. It depicts a man half tumbled from his coffin, with Death standing behind his head with an hourglass in his hand.

Raoul sprawled in the same way, his blood staining the steps of Portail St. Etienne. Death did not stand behind Raoul’s body. Instead it whispered in the dark as she stood in the garden beside the great cathedral, the direction of the voice impossible to pin-point.

That Death had an American accent was a little incongruous.

 “It doesn’t have to go down this way,” the voice said.

She shrugged, her eyes running along the rows of statues, checking the skyline, counting the gargoyles. A quote came unbidden _: “It is not the sleep of reason that produces monsters, but more than anything rationality, vigilant and unsleeping.”_ No wonder this was made the Temple of Reason after the Revolution. It must be the most rational building in France. 

As rational as she. She was a monster, and accepted it.

“I think it does,” she said, “I am what I am.”

 

> **Loki looked down at his joined hands, then looked back at her face. “And what will you do if I vow to spare him?” His voice was gentle and enquiring.**
> 
> **Natasha’s answer was swift, almost sing-song. “Not let you out.”**

Loki was a monster. They would not let him go.

 In the garden the voice of Death came again in the dark. “I can’t let you go.”

The guns hung in her hands by her sides. If they moved up a fraction, she would be dead.

“I know.”

 

> **Loki’s face was amused, his voice smiling. “Ah, no. But I like this. Your world in the balance, and you bargain for one man?”**

Barton had been given a job to do, one death to end war, but instead he bargained. He lived up to the name he had chosen. Hawkeye: the one who watched, the one who killed swiftly, but only when necessary.

In the dark garden in Paris the voice came again. “You don’t have to let them control you.”

Her voice was unmoved. “We are all controlled.” Or would be soon. That was the way the world was moving. Monitoring threats. Pre-emptive strikes. Russia, America, HYDRA, SHIELD, they were all the same.

“I guess we are.” The voice fell silent. She stood in the garden and waited, listening to lone voices drift in from place du Parvis Notre Dame.

 

> **”Regimes fall every day.” The truth came, matter of fact, unconcerned. “I tend not to weep over that, I’m Russian… or was.“**
> 
> **Loki paused as if considering a chess move. “And what are you now?”**

Long ago by Notre Dame, Death asked a different question. “What do you want?”

She pondered and her eyes passed over the rose window, grey in the night, past the skyline and past the great roof. She tilted her head back further, straight up into the Parisian sky. It was blank, no stars could be seen.

She wanted nothing because there was nothing to want. She merely existed. And yet that answer did not satisfy her. She murmured gently into the dark. “I don’t know.”

Her eyes travelled back down, along the skyline, over the Portico. She knew what carving was there, though it was invisible; Stephen forever dying under a hail of stones. She believed then (and believed now) that Stephen died for a fantasy. Suddenly she wanted that, craved it. How precious to know what you wanted, even if it was foolish, even if it got you killed.

“I don’t know what I want,” she said, her voice louder.

“Do you want to find out?” said Death. She paused to think and answered, “Yes.”

She waited a long time in the garden, for word to go up the chain of command. In another organisation the answer would have come back to her as a bullet through her brain, but Nick Fury had an appetite for risk that was unusual, perhaps unique. Finally she heard a movement behind her. A figure approached, a man whose face she had not seen before, dressed in black leathers with a bow over his shoulder. He came forward and extended a hand which she took.

“Hi,” said the voice of Death. “I’m Clint Barton. Welcome to SHIELD.”

And in the time after, she was debriefed by his handler, a man with an impassive face and the air of an expensive accountant. She sparred with Barton, ate with him, slept with him. When Nick Fury’s hunger for risk grew strong enough she went on missions with him. She and Coulson and Barton meshed together, three machines that formed a system, a whole greater than its three component parts. They knew each other, in the blood and in the bone.

But she still couldn’t answer Barton’s question. She read and reflected, and was grateful for the chance to think. One day reading Deleuze on Nietzsche it occurred to her that perhaps that was an answer of sorts, though she did not tell it to Clint.

So it was that interim answer that she gave to Loki, in answer to his question. An answer couched in words simple yet ambiguous, mild but with a hint of condescension.

 

> **“It’s really not that complicated.” Natasha rose from her chair and stood again before the glass wall, body erect, arms crossed and the faintest of smiles on her lips. “I’ve got red in my ledger, I’d like to wipe it out.”**
> 
> **“Can you?” Loki’s voice sounded concerned, his face wreathed with empathy. “Can you wipe out that much red?”**
> 
> **He paused, then the roll call began.**
> 
> **“Drakov’s daughter? Sao Paulo? The hospital fire? Barton told me everything.” He rose from the seat and moved towards her, his voice gaining intensity with each step.**

As she heard the words, she trembled and her horror was real. That was her secret: she was horrified at the time, at the scrabbling sound of hands against doors; at the choking of the girl, too broken to cry out. The Black Widow’s body and her mind are her weapons and so she modifies them, cutting emotion down to a bald sentence at one time, expanding it into layered description at another. As Loki spoke she bathed in the horror, bile rising in her throat, and the monster gloried in her pain.  

 

> **“Your ledger is dripping, is gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything?” He stood close to her, just on the other side of the glass. Derision filled his voice.**
> 
> **“This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer…” He pauses and spits out the last word. “PATHETIC!”**
> 
> **There was no smile on her face now. Her eyes were wide and fixed on his face.**

Loki’s mind ran straight to blood, an interpretation as telling as any on a Rorschach test. The data was processed as despair ran cold in her blood.

 

> **Loki was in full flow, his voice measured as if speaking to a jury. “You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will never go away.”**          

So spoke the alien, the new-minted monster. He saw in her an attempt at denial, a prayer for the impossible and he bludgeoned her with the truth. The past cannot be changed, old blood cannot be washed away.

Of course, the processes noted, Loki was projecting. He argued to stop himself believing the lie.

 

> **With a slam of the glass before him, the calm façade of the judge fell away. As Natasha started and rose to her feet, Loki leaned against the glass, looming over her, his face  feral. The dread he could see in Natasha’s face increased with each word he snarled.**
> 
> **“I won’t touch Barton. Not until I make him kill you! Slowly. Intimately. In every way he knows you fear! And when he’ll wake just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I’ll split his skull.”**

Her terror is real. It is in every part of her, the creeping of her flesh, the hairs standing on her neck, the tension in her stomach and the stinging of her eyes. She knows that Clint could destroy her as no-one else could. She knows that doing it would destroy him. Loki would do as he threatened, and the knowledge chills her.

 

> **She was sickened, terrified, so much so she turned away, hands to her mouth. As she moved towards the chair, Loki hurled his last words to her, a world of disdain in his voice. “This is my bargain, you mewling quim!” Broken she stood, her back to him.**

That is his bargain, the bargain of a monster. But although he is ancient, she has been a monster longer. She is Notre Dame, altered before she was ever finished, the work of many hands. She has been built and rebuilt, destroyed and stripped and restored many times. There was never a time she was whole and untouched.  

She has lain in ruins and been unmade, and her history is written stark inside her skull. It is written and no tears or pain can ever erase it. She knew this as she knew her own body. But was this truth in his bones? Not yet.

So quick to think of blood. So angry at what he saw as sentiment. So sure she was hiding from the truth. He reached that conclusion that because that was his temptation. His throne would be built on ashes and blood but part of him resisted the truth.

That was his weakness. 

> **She cannot even turn to face him. Her words tumbled from her trembling lips, her voice bleeding.  “You’re a monster!”**

She thrust the truth into the fault line and twisted it. He returned a truth like a throwing knife, at once a defence and a confession.

 

> **He laughed. “Oh no.” He paused as if tasting the words before he said them. “You brought the monster.”**

So easily his mind turns, so easily that she knows in an instant what his plan is. Her horror and disgust are edited away in an instant.

 

> **Natasha’s head came up as she straightened and turned. “So, Banner…that’s your play.”**
> 
> **“What?” He was flabbergasted, though only the flicker of his eyebrows revealed it. He was the trickster caught by an ancient trick. But she had no time for him now.**
> 
> **She touched her comm and spoke quickly. “Loki means to unleash the Hulk. Keep Banner in the lab, I’m on my way. Send Thor as well.” As she stepped hurriedly away, Loki’s eyes narrowed and he moved to keep her in sight. As she reached the door, she turned. Etiquette demanded it.**
> 
> **She turned to the creature in the cell and nodded politely. “Thank you for your co-operation.”**

* * *

She knew the story was not over, because it never is. There are only events that can be edited to give meaning. The talk among the trees in Notre Dame, the talk in the helicarrier can be made parallel each other to become a tale of vindication of an archer’s choice.

Nothing ended when she left that room. There was argument and battle and death, but also restoration. She sat with Clint Barton and they talked as the powerful rarely want to talk, a conversation running in both directions. They spoke as people who are part of each other speak, with half the conversation unsaid.

She was a spy, so why did she want to fight? What had Loki done to her? He had done nothing because he could do nothing. She would fight because that was her choice.

She would fight because she had been compromised, so many times. She would fight because there was red in her ledger and she wanted to wipe it out.

How quick Loki was to think of blood when her thought was of ink. It was a way of thinking she had caught from Coulson, looking forward not back. She was a debtor, deep in the red. She had been given a chance, and she would not take it as a gift.

She had told Loki the truth at the start, had told him what she was when he asked.  

Love is for children. (Loving is for grown-ups). I owe him a debt. (I owe him everything.) 


End file.
